NO! Chemical weapons in Iraq???

[Alex]

Originally Posted by scaeagles

And still, even allowing that you are correct on the passage of the final UN resolution, it came down to Saddam saying that no one could come in to verify or debunk that very intelligence.

You're equating the method by which Iraq could have avoided the war with the argument by which Bush pressed for it.

The argument was not that we needed unfettered access so that we could find out whether Iraq had them and was developing them but that we needed unfettered access so that we could find what he had and was developing and destroy them.

In fact, you could argue that in an environment where the world intelligence community had determined that Iraq absolutely was in possession of a usable arsenal and persuing an active development program that it would be impossible for Hussein to have provided sufficiently full access to disprove these claims. Those already convinced would simply assume he was doing an unexpectedly good job of hiding them (kind of like what happened when we did go in and didn't really find anything).

The President should simply have said:

"In a climate where we are actively at war with a certain strain of Islamic fundamentalism the prevarications of Saddam Hussein can not be left sitting on our flank. For 13 years his unwillingness to comply with the terms ending the Gulf War in 1991 have been an irritant in the world of international diplomacy. A game that has cost his country millions of dollars and thousands of lives. But until 9/11 it was just an irritant. However, we now find ourselves at war with a certain strain of Islamic fundamentalism who have shown themselves willing to use any weapon to strike us. Similarly, Saddam Hussein has shown himself willing to use aggressive violence to achieve goals of territorial expansion and to fulfill fantasies of revenge. We can not leave Saddam Hussein on our flank as we prosecute this war against Al Qaeda, just waiting for the day when his capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction comes into alignment with both his desire to do us harm and the desire of Al Qaeda to destroy us. Either he must do everything in his power to show he poses no risk to us in our war with Al Qaeda or we have no other option but to ensure he is not in a powerful position to interfere with that war."

That, in my view, is the real justification for the war. That, in my view, is what the Bush administration didn't have the political balls to say to the American people, and that, in my view, is why they are stuck defending inept justifications for a just war.